


Five Things that Could Have Happened in Naruto But Probably Didn't, and One that Couldn't Have.

by Gammarad



Category: Naruto Osmosis
Genre: Believe it!, Crack, Crack and Angst, Fandom By Osmosis, Gen, Mood Whiplash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-26 21:29:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21380875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad
Summary: I haven't seen any of Naruto and don't really know what it is about. However, I've been given Naruto fic and also SPaG checked Naruto fic, and chatted with a lot of Dreaming of Sunshine fans, and SPaG checked DoS fic, and generally picked up a little bit about Naruto (and then promptly forgot most of that).For this osmosis exchange, fencesit recommended acollection of Naruto metabyyunyuwhich I read some of. Not even half, though. This story is written based on that; it's somewhere between my best guess what Naruto is about and a set of tropes with Naruto character names.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10
Collections: Osmosis Exchange





	Five Things that Could Have Happened in Naruto But Probably Didn't, and One that Couldn't Have.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fencesit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fencesit/gifts).

> I've been reading more chapters of the meta, and I just now realized I mentally merged Sasuke and Kakashi into one character. So that's where that came from, if you were confused.
> 
> I plead that the names were similar (SSK and KKS!) and that merging them into one character whose whole family was killed AND who was the same age as Naruto, his rival, and both girls were in love with, made sense to me. Sorry! 🤣

### I. The Cursed Child

Hiruzen hired the wet nurse himself. "He's an infant," he said to her, paying her the first month's salary. She bowed, nervous in the presence of the important man, nervous about the assignment that she'd been unable to refuse. "Look after him until he's weaned." A year, maybe, then. She could do it for a year. She had no choice.

She grew to care for him, though. Such a cute baby, a cute toddler, pretty fluffy hair and big eyes, even the whisker-like scars on his face that marked his curse were cute. He walked early and began to talk early, too. The nurse showed him where the village dining hall was, where the community ate the midday meal together every day in solidarity, children, adults, elders, even the students from the ninja school, and once he was weaned, it might be the only food he got. She taught him to use the well when he grew just tall enough to reach the handle on the pump; he was too young, she didn't let her own children use the well until much older, but she didn't want him going without water. The danger of falling in, he would simply have to brave it.

She stretched the time out as long as she could. She might have weaned him at a year, but she let him suckle once a day for two years after that point, feeling it was not right to leave such a young child alone in the world. Even if he was a demon. He was three when Hiruzen gave her the month's pay and told her "Enough. He is too old to be a baby any longer." At least she'd managed to finish potty training him before she had to leave him on his own.

Naruto listened to his nurse say goodbye on her final day. He was too brave to cry. He walked by himself to the dining hall and people avoided him. He took extra food home with him after the meal, ate it sitting by himself in his room, played with rocks and a piece of wood pretending they were ninja fighting bad guys. He would grow up to be important, he thought. He didn't need anyone. In the middle of the night he woke up and was lonely and cried himself back to sleep, but in the daytime he never thought about his nurse. By the time he started school, he had forgotten all about her. It was like he'd been alone his entire life.

### II. Friends to Enemies

Ino and Sakura were friends after that first day at ninja school when a mean boy had been picking on Sakura and Ino came to her rescue. They worked hard and played gently and stood together against all the mean boys. Ino was prettier and taller and not quite as good at the fighting classes. Sakura was faster and a better fighter and not as good at talking to people or making friends. It was a great partnership. 

When the teachers forced them to fight each other, they took turns winning. It made one teacher really mad, because he knew Sakura could have won every time she fought Ino, but she kept making sure Ino won sometimes. The teacher made both of them fight Naruto, who was much better than either one. 

Naruto didn't want to hurt the girls, but the teacher would've been mad if he hadn't, and Naruto by this time had learned he had to do his best, no matter who got hurt. He did make sure it was all just bruises. He saved the lethal damage for future enemies. The teachers told all the young ninja students that they were going to have to fight and defend the village from terrible enemies, that was why they had to learn to be the best fighters and use their special powers.

But Sakura surprised him, she was a better fighter when she was mad, and after he beat Ino she was really mad. She managed to win and kick him pretty hard and gave him more of a bruise than he'd had in a bunch of fights. He thought if he hadn't been being careful not to injure her, he might have won, but then again, she was probably trying not to injure him too badly either. So maybe not. 

Ino surprised him too, afterward. "You didn't think Sakura was that good, did you?" Ino asked Naruto.

"You can be that good too. Believe it." Naruto tried to give Ino a pep talk. But she wasn't having that.

"I could tell you were surprised. She's going to be the best fighter in our class, once she gets over not wanting to hurt anyone," Ino said. "I know you think you are. But watch out, Naruto."

He didn't feel like giving Ino another pep talk after that speech. Maybe he was better off just being friends with boys. Girls were too confusing.

### III. Obligatory Love Triangles

There had been a big fight between another village's ninja and the bad guys, and the ninja who had defended that faraway village had almost all died. The kids from their ninja school were distributed through the ninja schools of other villages, just as the people of the village were distributed to other villages, since that village couldn't remain in its own land without ninja defenders. 

The people from Kakashi's village who were sent to Naruto's village were mostly very ordinary but Kakashi was something else entirely. He was big for his age and an excellent fighter and had moves none of the other ninja school kids had ever seen. Since he was another orphan ward of Hiruzen, Naruto considered Kakashi to now be his brother, and treated him accordingly.

Kakashi wasn't sure he liked that. Naruto was smaller than him and just about the exact same age and was treating him like a younger brother, which was annoying. He argued and fought hard with Naruto and they were almost evenly matched, but Kakashi won a little more often that first year. 

Ino and Sakura both got crushes on Kakashi. He was the second thing they'd ever fought over, but this fight didn't resolve itself. They competed for Kakashi's attention and complained at each other and stopped being friends, really, after a while, though it took longer for them to admit they weren't friends anymore. Sakura started always winning when she and Ino fought, because they were both trying to show off for Kakashi.

He in turn didn't seem to like either of them especially much. Kakashi didn't seem to like anyone much, really. He was grumpy. Everyone excused it as being because his whole family and almost everyone he'd ever known had died horribly and he'd been sent to a village where he hardly knew anyone and had no family. Which was true, and Ino especially seemed to understand how Kakashi felt, and sympathize, but it didn't make Kakashi any nicer to anyone. 

Naruto tried not to resent how much everyone made excuses for Kakashi because of his orphan status and yet no one made any such allowances for Naruto, who had been literally taking care of himself alone at the age of three and never known his parents at all and still managed to be positive and nice. And had a crush on Sakura who didn't seem to notice or care. But even though he liked Sakura and she liked Kakashi, Naruto and Kakashi slowly became sort of friends.

### IV. A Stoic Woobie

When the young ninjas were almost ready to graduate from ninja school, there was a big push from an enemy ruler called Danzo and an army of mind-controlled ninjas showed up to fight, trying to take over the village so Danzo could mind-control them and add them to his army. They had young ninja trainees with them, so because of the ninja code, the village ninja defenders had to also bring school kids to fight the opposite side school kids. Mostly none of the defender adults wanted to be the ones to kill brainwashed children. The whole war was already bad enough without that on their consciences.

It didn't seem to bother them at all to make their own children into killers. That was normal and ordinary and just what you did. The kids had super ninja powers after all, they needed to learn to use them, they'd be fighting and killing when adults, let them learn to do it now. The adults also didn't tell the students about the mind control and brainwashing Danzo had done. That was too potentially traumatic to tell kids, even kids trained and ready to fight and die to defend their village.

There was a big fight and the village won, though a bunch of adults were killed and some of the ninja student kids, too. The enemy retreated taking most of their surviving ninjas with them, but one of the enemy kids was left for dead. He wasn't actually dead, though, Ino and Kakashi had fought him and knocked him unconscious.

Sai woke up and there was Ino taking care of him. Because they'd been the ones to fight him, the head ninja had put the two in charge of taking care of him as he recovered. Because she was a girl and Kakashi wasn't very openly caregiving of a person, Ino was the one doing most of the work. She sat Sai up and gave him some water, then talked to him. 

He seemed not to care that he had been left behind or captured or anything. Ino was confused, and also a bit charmed. Sai's deadpan lack of expression hid a lot of turmoil she could sense. There was, surprisingly to her because she didn't know about the brainwashing, a lot of relief about not being with his own people anymore, buried under a pile of stoicism and refusal to let himself feel anything about anything. Ino was mystified but intrigued. It certainly didn't hurt that she thought Sai was very attractive. 

Coincidentally, she and Sakura began to get along again. Ino seemed to have decided to stop trying to get Kakashi's attention and let Sakura do whatever she wanted in that matter, and Sakura was also tired of being mad at her friend and fighting over a boy who didn't really care about either of them, so she accepted the victory such as it was and they started hanging out together again, not that they had much chance, because now that the ninja students had had this fighting experience, the ninja dispatchers started sending them on missions almost as if they had already graduated. Maybe slightly lower priority or easier ones, but still, it took a lot of their time now.

### V. The Beginning of the End, the End of the Beginning

Nine of the ninja students, Naruto, Sakura, Ino, Sai, and Kakashi and four more, made it through the training and gained powers and survived the missions the students had been going on since the fight against Danzo's army. They had to fight some monsters to prove they were ready to graduate; it was exciting and scary and turned out to be illusions that the older ninja had conjured for them to fight to prove they were ready. The nine of them were given code names and made into a team and sent to fight enemies with their ninja superpowers. 

The places they went were other countries with their own ninja villages, usually. They were named after nature things like Sand Country, Rain Country, Moss Country and so on. Each country had its own ninja village with a ninja school, and while most didn't have as good of superpowers as the one Naruto was from, they often had other special powers or skills or tricks so there was a lot of difficulty to the missions. 

Still, the worst thing was going back and seeing the new students. There weren't as many as when Naruto had been a student, and he was worried about that. But the demon curse prophecy was also a worry for him. He was going to have to face his destiny soon, and he didn't know if he, or his friends, would survive.

An older demon ninja with the same markings showed up with a team of friends and called Naruto and his friends out. May the best demon ninja win. It was a hard fight but Naruto's team managed to win because they encouraged each other and Naruto told them they could, to "Believe it" and his friends did believe it. Whereas the enemy demon just shouted mean things to his teammates when they lost or made mistakes. That made all the difference.

### ∞. Don't Believe It

Somehow, Naruto later became the new Ninja King, and was the authority over his village and the nation it provided ninjas to defend. After everything he and his friends had gone through, after all the suffering of having been trained to fight and kill from childhood, after seeing what it had done to Sai, especially... 

Sai and Ino had come to Naruto one evening right after his coronation. Of course by now, they all knew what Danzo had been doing. Sai's expression was entirely blank, Ino's was worried. Of course Sai's expression was always entirely blank. 

They sat cross legged in a small circle around a cozy covered fire pit and talked. 

"I've been thinking about what Danzo did to the kids in his village's ninja school," Ino said.

"Which was terrible," Naruto pointed out.

Ino nodded. "It was. He made them all want to do whatever he said and not think about it. To want to kill and not have feelings at all. He forced them to become what he thought he needed, perfect soldiers."

"Yes," Sai said. 

"And that was really really bad," Naruto said. "We would never do that. It's terrible."

"But," Ino said. She stopped. She seemed kind of worried. 

"But what?" asked Naruto.

"But our school, it didn't try to tell us not to have feelings..." Ino hesitated. "Well, it didn't try to tell us not to have any feelings at all. Though it did tell us not to have certain feelings. Like doubting that what we were doing was right. Or like being afraid. Or like caring more about living than about doing our jobs. You know. Those feelings they told us not to have."

"What happened to Ino was like what happened to me," Sai said in his monotone way of speaking. "She stopped feeling things she wasn't supposed to. But she still has them, underneath."

"Sai has feelings," Ino said, emphatically, like she was used to being disagreed with about this. "But he tries not to, he thinks he isn't supposed to. And so do we."

"It is nothing at all like that," Naruto protested.

Later that night when he was alone again, alone like he had been as a little child, he wondered. He'd been trying to believe it, believe everything he was supposed to believe. He had made himself believe.

But maybe that was wrong. Maybe he'd made himself believe lies. Maybe it really wasn't good for children to be taught from kindergarten to kill and fight and be brave and not care for their own lives or the lives of their enemies. 

Maybe now that he was king, that didn't have to keep on being done to new generations. Maybe if he changed that, it'd mean that there were more new generations after all. Maybe peace was possible.

Of course that could not possibly have happened.


End file.
